The Lifetime Guarantee

I may have told this little story before, although the thought of looking through nearly 300 stories to find out if I did is not my idea of fun, so I’ll tell it again, maybe.

I thought I’d understood the idea of a lifetime guarantee until I met Leonard Peterman, our plumber. It was 1967 when we bought our first house, a small side to side split in Randallstown, MD, in a 1956 development. It was a great little home, which was just the right size for a small, growing family in a nice, quiet neighborhood.

Our kitchen sink eventually developed a drippy faucet, and it seemed to be more than I could fix at the time, so we were forced to call a plumber. I am sure we looked up Plumber in the Yellow Pages, and came up with Mr. Peterman probably because he lived and or worked in Randallstown. In any case, he was the plumber.

He was a very nice older guy with lots of plumbing experience and he replaced the drippy faucet with a nice, shiny, simple, new kitchen faucet. He told us, without our asking, that it came with a lifetime guarantee.

Several years later I needed a plumber for something and I looked for Mr. Peterman, and he had passed away. After telling my wife that Mr. Peterman was dead, the next words out of my mouth were, “But what about our lifetime guarantee!”

That was an “ah-ha” moment for me! It was the first time a lifetime guarantee unveiled itself so that I understood that it was not my lifetime (at 27 years old) but Mr. Peterman’s lifetime we were talking about!